Makaravilakku is an annual festival held on January 14 in Kerala

Kerala

or Keralam is an Indian state located on the Malabar coast of south-west India. It was created on 1 November 1956 by the States Reorganisation Act by combining various Malayalam speaking regions....

, India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

 at the shrine of Sabarimala

Sabarimala

Sabarimala is a Hindu pilgrimage center located in the Western Ghat mountain ranges of Pathanamthitta District in Kerala. It is the largest annual pilgrimage in India with an estimated 45–50 million devotees visiting every year. Sabarimala is believed to be the place where the Hindu God Ayyappan...

. The festival includes the Thiruvabharanam

Thiruvabharanam

Thiruvabharanam is the sacred ornaments of Ayyappan, the presiding deity of Sabarimala temple. The ornaments are made of gold. It is believed that these ornaments are made at the orders of the Pandalam King, who adopted Ayyappan as his child....

 (sacred ornaments of Ayyappan

Ayyappan

Ayyappan is a Hindu deity worshiped in a number of shrines across India. Ayyappan is believed to be an incarnation of Dharma Sastha, who is the son of Shiva and Vishnu . The name "Ayyappan" is used as a respectful form of address in the Malayalam language, spoken in the Indian state of Kerala...

) procession and a congregation at the hill shrine of Sabarimala. An estimated half a million devotees flow to Sabarimala every year to have a darshan

Darshan

or Darshan is a Sanskrit term meaning "sight" , vision, apparition, or glimpse. It is most commonly used for "visions of the divine" in Hindu worship, e.g. of a deity , or a very holy person or artifact...

 (vision) of this ritual.

The name refers to the lighting of a bright "vilakku" (lamp) three times on the hill beside the sanctum sanctorum

Sanctum sanctorum

The Latin phrase sanctum sanctorum is a Latin translation of the biblical term: "Holy of Holies" which generally refers in Latin texts to the Holiest place of the Tabernacle of Ancient Israel and later the Temples in Jerusalem, but also has some derivative use in application to imitations of the...

 of Sabarimala, which were used to communicated the completion of deeparadhana in ponnampalamedu (and compare Makara Jyothi

Makara Jyothi

Makara is the name of a zodiac sign in Indian languages known as Capricorn in English. "Jyoti" means "light" in Sanskrit. Thus "Makara Jyoti" means "Light of Capricorn"....

).